Warhammer Online is currently playable and quite entertaining, at least for the first dozen or so levels. We still haven't had enough time to get into the higher level zones to see if there's enough content in the world to keep people engaged until the level cap but there are also lots of bugs that need addressing. My Chaos Marauder, for instance, has never been able to get the visuals for his mutated arm to show up. It's hard to feel like a mutant servant of Chaos when you're just punching people with a balled up fist instead of swinging a twisted club of deformed flesh and bone. Delsyn's character has been running around with a ludicrously massive belt around her waist that looks more like an inner tube than a strap of leather.

Visual bugs are minor issues in the grand scheme, however. The more pressing concerns will be ensuring that RvR is in a solid state for when the game launches and that there's enough content to keep people going until 40, where large-scale RvR will presumably keep them busy ad infinitum. There needs to be some kind of continued progression system for when people hit the level cap, a never-ending carrot-on-a-stick to keep players coming back for more. If Warhammer Online manages to clean up most of the little things in the next month or so, while also ensuring that early-adopting players don't hit a wall where the content falls apart within the first few weeks of play, then there's plenty of opportunity for this game to succeed.



3:00PM, August 6, 2008

Fargo: I've not encountered any major bugs as a Shaman yet, leading me to believe that some classes have been tested more thoroughly than others. But while the game lacks some polish, it's certainly playable and a lot of fun even in beta. From my vantage point I think having the game ready for launch by the September date is doable... ask me again, though, once I've gotten to the higher-level content.

Warhammer Online represents an enormous risk. It's thematically very similar to other games on the market, so players are going to need to really feel that it offers something new (gameplay-wise) in order to make the investment. And while there's a lot of nice innovations on the PvE front (I can't stop raving about the public quests), Warhammer is really gambling that the Realm-vs-Realm gameplay is that ace-in-the-hole that nobody else can do better.

But RvR is risky! What if one side has more players on the server? Either you're on the team that's getting whumped all the time, or you're on the team that periodically can't log in because you're at the population cap. Good RvR gameplay requires servers with high populations at roughly equal levels. Of course, Mythic is aware of all these problems and is ready to tackle them -- I specifically grilled the team about it at Comic-Con and learned what solutions they have ready to go -- but these are things that you really can't predict until the servers are live. The hail-Mary pass has been thrown -- will it be caught come September?